Yesterday SOPHOS, a well known Anti Virus vendor published a report here "Pitcairn Islands relays most spam per person, reveals Sophos" the gist of which is that 10 countries that have barely any population are the world leaders of "spam emitted per capita" to Mr SOPHOS I say what a load of baloney. Even if this was true, for arguments sake, what are we talking about here ? The population of Pitcairn is something is around 64 people !! (yes sixty four as in six four) So if 50% of the Pitcairn population had PC’s and 50% of those were infected thats 16 people with PC’s "emitting" spam, what does this mean, nothing, thats what it means, get real.
Adjusting figures like this for population makes no
sense, what does it prove ? if country 1 sends a million spams and has a
population of 1 million and another (country 2) sends 10 spams and has a population of one,
which is the worst ? according to SOPHOS country one has a ratio of 1 spam to 1
person, that’s OK, country 2 has 10 to 1 that’s not OK so we stick them at the
top of the list, what utter rubbish ! never mind that country one sent 100,000 times
more spam than country 2 ?
But wait for it, for the worst part, this will be picked up by
journalists all over the globe real soon and we will see this
regurgitated as "Pacific Islands Nations spamming hotbed" or "Spam in
Paradise" or even "Pacific Islands send more spam than anyone else" or
what have you. We have seen this time and time again with these so
called reports. The report says one thing, the journalists say
something else. Niue which came in second only has 256Kb outbound for
the whole country, you want to tell me what thats going to do, plus a
population of under 2000 people makes it an easy target for things like
this, ie when you start talking per capita, as a friend of mine said,
you can prove anything with small sample sizes.